Unhoused Angelenos face limited support amid LA fires
Unhoused Angelenos face limited support amid LA fires
More than 12,000 businesses, schools, houses of worship but mainly homes have been destroyed in Southern California’s ongoing fires. Newly homeless state residents are adding pressure on an already-strained system of housing. This includes the 75,000 people who were already unhoused before the fires wrought havoc and for whom limited aid is available.
“I think there’s always challenges with disaster response. Folks experiencing homelessness are the last to be thought of,” Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour.
There’s also a longer-term concern that the unpredicted destruction from the fires could exacerbate the housing affordability crisis. “You have twin challenges now where the housing market is going to be even more competitive, and we know that that can drive more folks into homelessness and drive costs up,” he said.
Ben-Achour spoke with Visotzky about the implications the fires could have on the region’s unhoused population. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: Can you give us an idea of how Los Angeles was managing the homelessness crisis before the fires?
Alex Visotzky: We’ve got 75,000 people experiencing homelessness in LA County on any given night, and 70% of those folks are outside. Los Angeles is doing more and more to address this crisis; the LA region houses over 20,000 people each year, but because of the unaffordability of our housing market, folks are falling into homelessness at too fast a rate for us to really drive those numbers of people experiencing homelessness down.
Ben-Achour: Well, I mean, now we’ve got on top of that a situation where people with homes are seeing those homes destroyed. Does that mean we’re going to see more people unhoused?
Visotzky: It might, right. You have twin challenges now where the housing market is going to be even more competitive, and we know that that can drive more folks into homelessness and drive costs up. We also know that for folks that are currently unhoused, it’s going to become all the more competitive and all the more challenging to get back into housing.
Ben-Achour: Yeah, and for the folks who are unhoused right now, I mean, how have the fires affected them?
Visotzky: So you know, in Los Angeles, only 30% of folks experiencing homelessness are in shelters; 70% of folks are outside. So that becomes even more challenging now when existing shelters are at risk. And then, you know, I think there’s always challenges with disaster response. Folks experiencing homelessness are the last to be thought of, right. When you have wildfires or other disasters, the guidance can be, you know, “Stay inside,” or “Keep your cell phone charged so that you can get up-to-date alerts.” So one of the things that Los Angeles and other regions need to look at is, how do we make sure folks experiencing homelessness become kind of central to disaster planning and a key component of disaster planning?
Ben-Achour: Yeah. And this is, of course, ongoing. What can we expect in the coming days, as unhoused people continue to face the fires and air quality situation?
Visotzky: I think in the days ahead, what we’re going to need to see — and what I hope we’ll see — is just an unprecedented coordination between local government, state government and federal government to ensure that we’re getting more resources available to get folks to safety. Here at the National Alliance, that means we’re advocating for HUD and Congress to work together to make what’s called RUSH funding available — that’s funding that can augment and assist with efforts to get folks into shelter and get folks into housing.
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